Whatever the main theme of a Soviet peace campaign, an almost constant sub-theme has been peaceful coexistence.

       The idea, sparked by Lenin, was frequently reiterated by Stalin. The German ambassador to Moscow, Count von Schulenberg, has recorded that Foreign Minister Molotov told him reassuringly in August, 1939, at the time the infamous Pact was being negotiated: "The principle of peaceful coexistence of different political regimes is a principle long established in the foreign policy of the USSR." But the apotheosis of the principle came in the reign of Khrushchev, when it was promoted from a lowly "tactic" to a primary "strategy." In communist conflict management the distinction is vital.

       The Twentieth Party Congress, it should be recalled, met in early 1956, about half a year after the Geneva Summit Conference, where the Western nations projected and the Soviet delegation accepted the concept of a "balance of terror." With direct war thus ruled out for the immediate future, the Kremlin saw its hands untied for other varieties of conflict.

       Khrushchev's enthusiasm for the exciting horizons was overshadowed in the world press by his "secret speech" against Stalin, but it is in the record. Cutting through the glutinous communist prose, what he said was:

       The essence of the new strategy, as molded in the following years, was decidedly not a truce, but a reaffirmation of revolutionary goals and methods. This was not understood by a world yearning for normalcy. Year after year, Khrushchev and his associates have tried to set us straight, but with only indifferent success. They have even charged that our refusal to understand was deliberate, intended to blur the Kremlin's true revolutionary image. Whether or not the capitalists understand it, however, the communists promised to attack, attack, attack.

       In the course of a visit to Hungary in 1958, Khrushchev said: "We have always declared and declare now that we do not want war, but we do not renounce class war . . . Capitalism is at its ebb, heading for collapse. This does not mean that it is already lying down with its legs stretched out. Much work has yet to be done to bring about such a state," Peaceful coexistence, as he saw it, by providing insurance against a major war, opened dazzling opportunities for activating that "work."

       He put the whole issue crudely but frankly at another time; "We must realize that we cannot coexist eternally. One of us must go to the grave. We do not want to go to the grave. They do not want to go to their grave either. So what can be done? We must push them to their grave."

       An analysis of the strategy behind the Soviet slogan was made in 1960 for a congressional committee by the Foreign Policy Institute of the University of Pennsylvania. In his address to the Supreme Soviet in October, 1959, it said, Khrushchev wanted all communists to understand "that his peaceful coexistence policy is based on hard calculations of winning vital advantage in the struggle with the West, and not any softening of either the heart or the ideology"—that the game is to be played by the old rules for the same ends that Lenin had laid down.

       Khrushchev's policy has been taken over intact by the new bosses. Brezhnev made this clear at the Party Congress in the spring of 1966. The Soviet Union, he emphasized, regards peaceful coexistence "as a form of class struggle between socialism and capitalism." (302) The capitalists, he went on, "will never give up their power of their own free will. It is only through' tenacious class struggle that the working class and the rest of the working people will achieve victory . . . . Naturally there can be no peaceful coexistence where internal processes of class and national liberation struggle in the capitalist countries or colonies are concerned."

       This was standard for all communist exegesis on the 'strategy of peaceful coexistence from 1956 forward. There would be no ideological truce, Khrushchev had said during his American visit—not "until shrimps learned to whistle." But ideological warfare, to communists, is not a philosophical debate. It means action.

       In a militant speech on January 6, 1961—the famous speech which President Kennedy, according to the New York Times, called "a Red blueprint for eventual world domination" —Khrushchev again addressed himself to the core of the new strategy. "The policy of peaceful coexistence, as regards its social content," he said, "is a form of intense economic, political and ideological struggle of the proletariat against the aggressive forces of imperialism in the international arena," There will be more and more uprisings "against rotten reactionary regimes, against the colonizers," he promised. "The communists fully support such just wars and march in the front ranks with the peoples waging liberation struggles."

       On July 14, 1963—while American and British delegates were in the Soviet capital in connection with the nuclear test-ban treaty—the Moscow press tried to tell them the facts of international life in the wondrous era of peaceful existence. "We fully stand for the destruction of imperialism and capitalism," it said. "We not only believe in the inevitable destruction of capitalism but we are doing everything for this to be accomplished as soon as possible."

       Writing in the October, 1965 issue of the World Marxist Review, the Kremlin's American gauleiter, Gus Hall, also put the matter clearly enough: "The policy of peaceful coexistence . . . has never been a policy based on the acceptance of the status quo in world relations. (303) It has been and remains a weapon of struggle—a struggle in which both hands are used. With one hand, the aggressive forces of world imperialism and world war are held back; with the other, full support is given to the forces fighting for national independence and to the peoples moving toward a socialist goal."

       A few more verbatim quotations, all drawn from communist leaders and publicists in the 1960's leave no margins for doubt that the policy at its core is one of intensified and more self-confident belligerency;

       One communist writer described the new -strategy as. "a well-thought-out and well-founded policy to bring us victory over imperialism." (304) A Soviet ideologue named Melnikov underlined that "peaceful coexistence is directed toward making social progress and accelerating the inevitable collapse of imperialism." The authors of a Czechoslovak book asserted bluntly: "Peaceful coexistence means maximum support to the oppressed nations, including arms."

       In Moscow, on September 7, 1966, one Y. Arbatov wrote: "The various forms of direct aid by socialist countries to the revolutionary movement—that is to say, armed intervention—are by no means excluded." A few weeks later, on September 30, a party theoretician, Professor M. Rozental, made the same point: "Where no other possibility exists to smash the obstacles which stand in the way of the gathering forces of socialist change except by force of arms, a Marxist party will follow this path with all determination, boldly raising the banner of armed insurrection at the opportune moment."

       This repeated stress on armed help and armed insurrection in both top newspapers in a single month, Arbatov in Izvestia and Rozental in Pravda, was significant. In Moscow such things are planned. No doubt it was intended to impress the outside world with the Kremlin's combative spirit; but the great democracies were far too busy building the bridges of détente to pay any attention.

       In the euphoric mood generated abroad by the de-Stalinization ploy, it is forgotten that in downgrading Stalin, his inheritors upgraded Lenin, today the main mentor for Kremlin policy. And if Lenin was unambiguous on one precept it was his certainty that there can be no peaceable solution of relations with the non-communist world, "As long as capitalism and socialism exist, we cannot live in peace," he said. "In the end, one or the other will triumph—a funeral dirge will be sung over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism." Also; "The existence of the Soviet republic side by side with imperialist states for a long time is unthinkable. One or the other must triumph in the end. And before that end supervenes, a series of frightful collisions between the Soviet republic and the bourgeois states will be inevitable." (305)

• Decades of Aggressions

       Plainly, peaceful coexistence & la Kremlin holds no encouragement for those who profess to foresee a viable détente between the two worlds. The era of coexistence, taking 1956 as the starting point, has been far from peaceful. It compasses the Soviet bloodbath in Hungary, a series of Moscow-managed crises in the Middle East, installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Soviet arming of the Simbas for Congo rebellion, the Kremlin-led Tricontinental Conference in Havana and the subsequent terrorist activities in Latin America by the Military Directorate there set up. On May 21, 1967; Pravda pinpointed the targets of the moment, promising support to the "Armed Forces. of Liberation" in Guatemala, Venezuela, and Colombia, as well as guerrillas in Peru, Haiti, and Paraguay. It has been an era of undiminished communist hate propaganda against the West and especially the United States.

       Peaceful coexistence, moreover, has not deterred nuclear bomb-rattling by the Kremlin. Few countries have been spared its threats of attack. Between 1956 and the end of 3 960, according to General C. P. Cabell, then deputy director of the CIA, Soviet leaders "have on more than forty occasions threatened fifteen countries with destruction by rockets with nuclear warheads." The list grew a lot longer in the following years.

       Boasting of the first manned satellite flights, in a speech on December 9, 1961, as reported by Tass, Khrushchev added: "If we could send up Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, we could of course send up other payloads and land them wherever we wanted." His nuclear blackmail continued so persistently that the U.S. News & World Report could put this headline on a round-up story: "Is Khrushchev 'Dr. Strangelove'?"

       To equate all of this with a new, more pacific mood calls for exceptional powers of self-deception. But many, too many, have shown themselves equal to the challenge. For nearly half a century, as already noted, every verbal shift in the Moscow "line" has produced a new mirage of optimism in the desert of free-world fears. (306) Recently, Bertram 0. Wolfe made a partial compendium of these hopes, every one which in turn proved false:

       Each maneuver and slogan has been greeted as the long-awaited "fundamental transformation"; "the sobering that comes from the responsible exercise of power over a great nation"; the "response to the pressure of reality"; the modification of totalitarian power by the growth of a "rationalist technocracy"; the "sobering effect of privilege upon a new privileged class"; a "feeling of national responsibility to Russia as against the aim of World Revolution"; "the quiet digestion period of a sated beast of prey" no longer on the hunt; the "diffusion of authority which could lead to a constitutional despotism"; the "mellowing process that sooner or later overtakes all militant movements"; the "sober second thoughts" which have come at long last from a recognition of the universal and mutual destructiveness of nuclear war"; the "erosion" or even "the end of ideology."

       Each of the opinions in quotations marks, Mr. Wolfe pointed out, came not from amateurs but "from the writings of some highly respected specialist in Russian history and Soviet affairs." To his compilation I would add one of my own favorites in this fascinating record of Western wishful thinking. As the Geneva Summit Conference approached in July, 1955, R. A. Butler, then Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared: "There is in the international scene today a feeling of spring after a long winter of discontent." It proved to be, alas, one of the shortest political springs on record.

       Despite Soviet candor about its real revolutionary and violent content, peaceful coexistence has produced its own rose-tinted mirages. Perhaps the most fantastic is the theory of "convergence," advanced in all seriousness, according to which Soviet totalitarianism and our open societies are moving toward a middle ground of idyllic cooperation. (307)

       The theory has moved the communists to both laughter and fury. A typical comment, by one A. Solodnikov in International Affairs: "The concept of a future in which capitalism and communism will 'converge' on an 'equal footing' is Utopian through and through . . . . Life will always smash the advocates of ideological compromises and their bleak illusions and attempts to find a 'third way' in the struggle of the two systems . . . . Our socialist work is definitely helping capitalism in one thing: to dig its grave more quickly."

       Unambiguous communist rejection of the various theories of accommodation, however, does not discourage the one-sided love affair. In Western ears peaceful coexistence sounds like a promise to "live and let live." The wooing supplicants find it hard to grasp that to communists it means "live and don't let live."

       The hard truth was summed up by Professor Stefan T. Possony, an American scholar and historian: "The traditional goal of communism, the conquest of the entire world, is not only reaffirmed but is held far more strongly and hopefully than in the past. It is 'unthinkable' that communists will abandon their goal of world domination regardless of the price they have to pay." It has been acknowledged by other Americans:

       But Secretary Rusk credits too uncritically the assumption of Sino-Soviet disagreement on world-revolutionary tactics. True, Peking constantly inveighs against Moscow's coexistence slogan. For obvious forensic advantage, in its struggle for primacy in world communism, it chooses to misunderstand the slogan precisely as it is misunderstood in some Western statements on accommodation and "convergence," as "proof" that the Kremlin has joined the capitalist world. But an examination of Soviet and Chinese pronouncements, slight semantic differences aside, reveals-nearly absolute agreement on the methods and goals.

       In 1965, Marshal Lin Piao, Defense Minister of Red China, presented Mao Tse-tung's view of the current world. He defined North America and Western Europe as "the cities of the world," with Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the "countryside." The contemporary world revolution, he said, "presents a picture of the encirclement of the cities by the rural areas." By conquering the countryside, the cities will be surrounded, weakened, and overcome. The "colossus of U.S. imperialism," he argued, "can be split and defeated. The people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and other regions can destroy it piece by piece, some striking at its head and others at its feet."*

       Except for his cities-and-countryside metaphor, what Lin Piao said was exactly what Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and their confreres have been saying. Peking and Moscow alike now see the West "encircled" by the less developed nations and regions. Both, for the present, rule out direct war with "U.S. imperialism" but concentrate on wars of liberation, guerrilla terror and subversion in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Both are thus equally committed to indirect offensives through the soft underbelly of the non-communist world. Lin Piao merely restated the basic revolutionary strategy of Soviet Russia under its shield of peaceful coexistence.

       Yet the very people who have discounted or ignored the Soviet strategy have been deeply alarmed by its Chinese equivalent. This curious reaction again reflects the perennial free-world dream of easy solutions of its dilemma. By dividing the enemy into "good" and "bad" communists, it is easier to believe in détente, convergence, and other such comforting prospects. No matter what the Soviet Russians say and do to disown the label, they remain "good" communists to those promoting the one-sided love affair.

       While touring Africa in the latter part of 1963, Chou En-lai, Mao's Premier, declared: "If anything unusual happens, the Soviet Union and China will stand shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm . . . . Remember, both China and Russia belong to the socialist camp." Because such rock-bottom realities do not fit into their stubborn hopes of Soviet-American détente, those eager to believe that the cold war is over dismiss and forget them.

       The consoling claim nowadays is that communist unity is a thing of the past—that "this. Humpty Dumpty will not and cannot be reassembled," as George Kennan phrased it. This is far from established and in any case is irrelevant in practical terms. There have been a few exceptions (notably in India) but overwhelmingly, in the clinches, the communists show remarkable cohesion as against their common foe. They have been absolutely unified in support of North Vietnam, on the Dominican issue, on support of communist-brewed mischief anywhere. In Havana they sit together on the central strategy board for Latin America.

       The all-important "gimmick" in peaceful coexistence a la Kremlin, though implicit or explicit in all Soviet statements, is rarely comprehended or even mentioned in the West. (310) It is that the USSR remains free to incite and arm "liberation wars," guerrilla movements, subversion in our world, whereas the democracies are debarred from similar liberating activities in their world.

       Suppose the unthinkable happened: suppose the non-communist nations staged a conference exactly like the one in Havana in 1966 and set up a Military Directorate to plan and direct liberation wars in the communist countries. The howls from Red capitals would be equaled only by the howls of anguish from appeasers and "bridge-builders" in the free world. We have meekly accepted the strange, self-paralyzing, and self-defeating principle that communist nations and colonies are inviolate, regardless how openly and savagely they violate other nations and regions.

       This shocking disparity in rights of maneuver under the doctrine makes peaceful coexistence a trap for the West. Perhaps one fine day the free world will desist from nibbling at the bait long enough to assert reciprocity. It need only decide to be as resolute in promoting "transition from communism to freedom" as the communists in promoting "transition from capitalism to communism." The least we deserve, in simple political logic, is the same freedom of action against Red imperialism that its masters not only claim but exercise against what they call Western imperialism.

       What is probably the best study of the Kremlin slogan was written by Dr. Richard V. Allen of Georgetown University (now with the Hoover Institution) for the Standing Committee on Education Against Communism of the American Bar Association. First published in 1964 under the title Peaceful Coexistence: A Communist Blueprint for Victory, it was reissued in an enlarged and updated version in 1966 as Peace or Peaceful Coexistence?

       "The specific function of peaceful coexistence" it found, "is not the establishment of a period of relative calm. It is to provide conditions favorable for waging a many-pronged offensive against and within the non-communist world." In the communist understanding of the slogan, Dr. Allen underlines, "one does not practice peaceful coexistence, one wages it. (311) Peaceful coexistence is to the communists a unilateral strategic doctrine imposed upon the 'inevitably doomed' adversary . . .."

       His conclusion applies not only to the latest variation on the theme of peace but to all previous Muscovite tunes:

       The great paradox of our time may well turn out to be our inability to recognize that the cold war has in reality become more intense despite the increasing appearances of peace. It need not be emphasized that the overwhelming sentiment of the free world is to live in peace. But to mistake the illusion of peace for genuine peace would be a profoundly dangerous, perhaps fatal mistake.

• Chinese Puzzle

       For nearly a decade the deepening struggle between Red Russia and Red China has provided Westerners addicted to political daydreaming with blissful visions. The "good" communists in Moscow would be neutralized by the "bad" communists in Peking, and perhaps driven into alliance with the democracies against that common danger. Then came the locust plague of Mao Tse Tung's Red Guards, wrecking all previous calculations and hopes.

       As we go to press the turbulence in China is still running wild, like a hundred rivers that have broken through their levees. Anything may happen. I am aware of the dangers of casting in type even hypothetical judgments. (312) But the developments are important enough to justify the risk.

       In passing we should note that the standard argument for admitting Red China to the United Nations was that "we can't ignore 700 million Chinese." Now it is clear that the Peking regime, far from representing those millions, doesn't even represent the Chinese communists. Its vaunted monolithic stability turns out to be a fairy tale.

       The internal struggle has been erroneously described as factional. More precisely, Mao Tse-tung, Marshal Lin Piao, and their associates, backed by brainwashed and know-nothing youth, have unleashed a revolution against their own governing apparatus, against the great majority of power-holders in party committees, administrative organs, social organizations. The role of the Chinese Red Army, which may prove decisive, is as yet ambiguous, with segments throwing their weight now on one side, now on the other.

What are the possible outcomes?

       First: The authority of Mao may be restored, perhaps on the basis of a face-saving compromise. That would mean, at least as long as he remains alive, a freezing of the old Sino-Soviet enmity. The USSR might well exploit the disordered transition period to seize vulnerable border territories—possibly Inner Mongolia, where anti-Mao leaders appear to have the upper hand, but especially the province of Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan), to which Russia has historic claims and which is now the site of Chinese nuclear testing. Given its overwhelming military superiority and logistical advantages, Russia probably could make such grabs, camouflaged to be sure as local rebellions, without real danger of war.

       Second: The opposition elements, in general the entrenched party and government bureaucracy, may triumph over the Mao-Lin group—if not now, then later, with the death of Mao. The most significant effect would be a restoration of the "fraternal unity" between the two communist powers.

       The Kremlin had made clear from the beginning that its sympathies are with Mao's more reasonable and pragmatic foes. (313) Acting President Liu Shao-chi, the acknowledged Leader of the anti-Mao alignment, has always been regarded as pro-Soviet. That Moscow's self-interested sympathy is translated into material and strategic collaboration against Mao can be taken for granted.

       The re-establishment of the great communist monolith from the Elbe to the Pacific would cancel out all the paralyzing delusions of those who want desperately to believe that the communist danger is over. It would be a deathblow to Western theories of convergence and détente.

       Third: The vast Chinese empire may collapse into its traditional condition of "war-lordism'': regional military governments, conceivably giving lip-service to a weak central authority but ruling on their own. This outcome, of course, would mark the end of Chinese communism and would give a black eye to the entire world communist movement. To Moscow it would therefore be decidedly distressing, almost as distressing as a victory for Mao Tse tung.

       The possibility of Soviet intervention at some point cannot be ruled out. Whether or not it involved formal declarations of war, war it would be. For the Kremlin this would have the great advantage of galvanizing its citizenry in old-fashioned patriotism at a time when the Soviet regime craves national unity. The Russians have always disliked and feared their Chinese neighbor-in part a heritage from the long Mongolian occupation of their country. They could be welded for conflict with China far more readily than for war with the democratic West.

       We need only suppose, for speculation's sake, that there is a Sino-soviet war to realize the absurdity of talk about a Western alliance with Russia against Chinn. The Soviet objective would be to reinstate a communist government of its own kind and under its own control. If attained, it would make international communism stronger and more dynamic than ever before. The hopes of the West, unless it had been reduced to idiocy by commitments to building bridges to communist regimes, would be to give the Chinese people another chance for ordered progress in relative freedom. (314) Far from coinciding, the purposes of the USSR and the West would be diametrically opposed and an alliance utterly senseless.

       What of the seven hundred millions, the gray masses in whose name all contenders pretend to speak? One of the most knowledgeable of the China-watchers in Hong Kong, Robert Elegant, posed this question to recent escapees from the tormented country. "The mood of the masses of Communist China," he then reported in his syndicated article on January 25, 1967, "is one of revenge—revenge for years of humiliation, repression, deprivation and above all, revenge for the communists' violent attempts to reshape the nature of every individual."

       The masses neither understand nor care about the ideological disputations. The peasants, and that is nearly the whole of the population, want an old-style family farm. The workers want more wages and more food. The intellectuals, except the minority embroiled in the struggle, want only to be let alone to think and study and work without whips at their backs.

       By the time these words see print, the pieces in the tantalizing Chinese puzzle may have fallen into place. Whatever the pattern that emerges, it will have a profound effect on Soviet Russia. (315)